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Book review: What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hillary Clinton is still angry in this revealing account of why she failed to become America’s first woman president

The face of defeat: Hillary and Bill Clinton at Donald Trump’s swearing-in, January 2017WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

The Sunday Times, September 17 2017, 12:01am

At an early point in her admirably candid account of her 2016 presidential election defeat by Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton describes the numbing process of adjusting to a result so shocking that “there are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow”.

She had been so confident of winning, she writes, that in August 2016 she bought the house next door to her home in Chappaqua, New York, in part to accommodate “the large team that travels with a president”. She intended to wear white for her victory speech, “the colour of the suffragettes”.

Her distaste for Trump is not merely political; she detests him

Instead, she had to paste on a brave smile and make a painfully polite concession call to Trump before going home the day after the election “deeply…